I think it's pretty funny to call out the clothing as stylish.
As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not.
I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...
The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to hang out with the Lone Gunmen for a bit.
Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be there; No portable means of communication (easily / cheap). Now we have portable comm devices where we even use them between rooms.
As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.
24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and internet usage was fast growing, but gaps in the digital side meant it was still plausible that field agents were important. They also had plot lines such as the bad guys using online video game chat (a smaller but growing thing in the early 2000s) as a hidden communication channel which I believe is pulled from real events.
Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all?
One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.
You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.
For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.
The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism. Technology was going to make our lives better and unlock opportunity, not take all our jobs and render us irrelevant.
To me, the weirdest thing about the AI hype cycle is the inherent nihilism of it all. If there's one thing I miss, it's the optimism. I used to be enthusiastic about what the tech industry was doing and where it was going.
> The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
How about this: Back in the late 90s, after Google appeared, search actually worked, worked well, and was not yet deeply tied into creepy tracking and ad tech.
I would wade through thousands of geocities memed sites to have that experience again.
The optimism died a long time ago. I’m a Millennial, the 90s flew by as I was growing up, but one of my formative experiences was playing Deus Ex in 2001, after 9/11. It gave me healthy distrust of technology, governments, big corp, and what the world is going through today only reinforces this vision of the world. Of course I am nihilistic about AI: when I read about Altman and Karp, I see Bob Page. These are NOT the type of people I want to create a new world order. Yet these are exactly the people positioned to create a new world order.
I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.
I miss the optimism too. What drew me to tech was how it felt like we were trying to make people's lives better.
These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something was lost
For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.
> But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically.
My wife and I are moderately social with diverse groups of friends. I haven't been to a party where guests were glued to screens in years.
I can think of a few, but they were so uninteresting that we didn't prioritize future events with those people. Why would I spend my limited free time hanging out with people who don't want to socialize?
Thinking back, those people probably think that staring at phones at social events is just what people do, so it was okay. When you don't see your friend group self-selecting into a bubble of people with shared beliefs and behaviors, you think everything around you is how everyone in the world operates.
I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this."
I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.
To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
> That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
This is true. I didn't really think about it from a kid/youth perspective. As an adult I think you can live a similar life style but kids definitely have been robbed of all of this. I'm past 25 and I average a house party a month still I would say. House party's are permission free though, if you want one then host one.
> And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
Video stores still exist. Depending how big of a town/city you will still bump into people you know if you are out and about.
>You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
Live how you want. If it's good others will follow your lead. I deleted all social media over five years ago and I have some friends who have at least tried to follow my lead. I read a ton, my friends do as well. I have a group of guys to play magic with every week where we take turns hosting.
If you have a vision of what you want the world to be the first step is to live that way yourself. Either others will follow or they won't, but you can't force people to do anything.
Books have been replaced by DVDs at my library. I spent almost all my time at a book store for a year in Austin and can count the number of active readers I saw in there on one hand. It's depressing.
Reading is an independent activity by nature. I don't really see how other people not reading should affect you. There is nothing depressing about nature. It's natural that the majority of people would shift away from reading and gravitate towards easier forms of media consumption.
This wasn’t my experience at all. I read similar novels as friends, we talked about them, tried to replicate some of the stuff the characters did, have suggestion about books to each other, lent them out, went to the bookstore together, etc.
People read books on public transport before the iPhone and that was often the path to strike a conversation with a complete stranger who nonetheless shared interests (depending on the book they were reading).
Books certainly could be completely individualized experiences, but they offered a whole world of socializing opportunities.
Growing up in the 90s in Moscow wasn't all cakewalk (immigrated to US soon after), but I fondly remember watching the show and reading Russian-translated X-Files books. I don't know why the books were so fascinating to me. Imagined my life in America as something akin to Fox Mulder: suit, nice hair, car, hotel, official business. The lifestyle was all foreign to me, and also the coolest ever.
One of the all-time great shows. Mythology episodes mixed in with the "monster of the week" ones for the casual viewers. The music was also pretty special. Each episode was like a mini feature film.
Can’t remember where I first heard it (message board? Kumail’s podcast?), but I read/heard a really strong case that the core theme of the X-Files is informational enclosure/the dawn of the modern cyber panopticon, and how for good or bad all the little weird, secret corners of the world get catalogued and dissected as technology encircles all.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true. People either believed everything they heard, or they took it with a grain of salt. Either way, it was incredibly easy to let your imagination run wild with a crazy idea, even if you firmly believed in science and the burden of proof. That was the one-half the magic of The X-Files.
The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.
Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.
The 90s were my 20s - I still remember walking back with my girlfriend from the sea in the evening, across a residential area and we could here the jingle of X-Files on tv through open windows.
This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish.
It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.
Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package.
There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.
And let's be honest, that is also partially Clinton's legacy. Him and Tony Blair, with their "Third Way" triangulation bullshit, effectively moved the Overton window to the right for good. And here we are.
Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.
Yes, it was short and fun, to those who appreciated it, but the world was saturated with X-Files. I would have waited 5-10 years, then brought the Lone Gunmen back for a revival. The viewers would've had time to miss X-Files and thus Funny & Quirky would have appealed more to a nostalgic audience. I think it can work again, given the right conditions, the writers, same actors + new faces, even different shows/genre crossovers. There I go, again, giving advice for which I am never credited :|
I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times.
The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Tech was exciting, futuristic.
Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.
People talked socialized read books.
Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.
The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.
Literally everything is just shite now. Movies and TV are shite, food is shite, the economy is shite, politics is shite, dating is shite, electronics and tech is cheap ad infested shite, even the reffing in sports is shite! Things get more expensive yet also worse somehow, our wages don't even come close to matching inflation, housing is propped up to keep old people's investments secure meaning we don't even have places to live.
Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.
The media landscape we have is something I couldn't have even imagined when I was young in the 80's. However, I can go back and watch, for free, essentially every movie ever made. I've gone back and watched dozens (maybe hundreds) of movies that I remember coming out when I was a kid, wanting to see, but never getting to because I was too young, or I couldn't find them at video stores, etc.
There were a _lot_ of _really_ bad movies and TV shows that came out when I was young, including movies and TV shows that I loved at the time. They were awful - we just watched them because there was literally nothing else to do. We're bombarded with entertainment choices now and our standards have gone up.
The best TV shows today are as good as or better than TV has ever been and there's usually an ad-free option.
Televised sports is an exception- the number of ads is insane and there's no real way to avoid them. On the plus side though, I have access to a lot more games/matches/races/etc...
Homelessness was a giant issue in 1991, there were pop songs about it: Gypsy Woman (La da dee la da da) by Crystal Waters, and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl. We don't seem to have pop stars singing about issues any more. Unsure whether that's a plus or minus.
My country had a complete economic collapse in the 90s and people could barely afford food, so mileage varies.
As an oil exporter country we were saved in the 00s by oil prices ballooning to the moon, so that was the golden decade for us instead (relatively speaking, and mostly in the big cities).
I was born in 1974 and I remember being vaguely annoyed in my 20's at how the 90's "ruined" the 80's - I remember things being way better in the 80's and society starting to go downhill around 1991.
I will say, though, the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_. My kids watch "Stranger Things" and ask if it was really like that when I was a kid ("did you really just get on your bike and go over to your friends houses?") and wish they had experienced the 80's (and even the inferior 90's). I _never_ felt that way about my parents generation - the 60's were interesting from a historical perspective but I never wanted to be there.
I agree with a lot of that person wrote. I'm a healthy white guy born in 1970 into a very supportive family in a middle-class town in Canada. I basically won the lottery.
I was a kid in the 1970s, a teenager through the 80's and turned 20 in 1990. I had everything I needed and most things I wanted (eventually). High school was easy and actually fun. University was cheap (compared to now) and I had a blast. Graduating with a degree in comp. sci. in 1995 was bonkers. Opportunities were everywhere.
There have been some ups and downs, but I really don't think I would have wanted to be born any other time or place.
They mention being a teenager then, so a lot of their feelings might come down to "it was fun being a teenager" sprinkled with some effects of late stage capitalism.
I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint.
It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle.
I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as the guy next to you. This was a thing into my 20s, as late as 2007 probably.
It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...
Ehhh, the post-grunge world was a bit of a musical wasteland. Rock died as a culturally relevant force with Cobain, but hip-hop hadn't ascended yet, so we were stuck in this weird doldrum that gave us things like the swing revival, ska, nu metal, and boybands. I mean Counting Crows were the big megastars at the time. Really hard to name a timeless album from '96-'99 the way you easily could on either side of that range. Just see the set-list for Woodstock '99 to further illustrate the point.
Mezzanine from Massive Attack, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Big Pun’s Capital Punishment, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby from Fatboy Slim, and Hello Nasty from the Beastie Boys. The K&D Sessions from Kruder and Dorfmeister. Stunt by Barenaked Ladies. Then there’s one of my personal favorites, Mermaid Avenue from Billy Bragg and Wilco.
You mentioned rock. How about Hellbilly Deluxe from Rob Zombie? Follow the Leader by Korn. The New Radicals released Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too. Garbage’s Version 2.0, and Lenny Kravitz 5, and Van Halen III. What’s more rock than Walking into Clarksville by Page & Plant?
OK Computer (1997). Mezzanine (1998). New Forms (1997). Peak trip hop and drum and bass. I remember it being pretty great. But yeah, I was like 17, so …
Wow I've never disagreed harder with an HN comment in my entire life. Counting Crows were a single band that got some radio time in the early 90s. Calling them the big megastars during '96-'99 makes you sound like you weren't alive then. That statement just sounds so utterly ridiculous to me. It's like a narrow-minded European claiming that everyone in the US just eats nothing but hot dogs. Timeless albums from that era:
- Odeley (Beck '96)
- Aenima (Tool '96)
- OK Computer (Radiohead '97)
- Homogenic (Bjork '97)
- This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about (Modest Mouse '96)
- Stankonia (Outkast '99)
- Kid A (Radiohead '00; began recording in Jan '99)
You were just rage baiting, right? The late 90s were an absolutely legendary time in popular music history.
Edit: Yes, agree with commenter who mentioned Underworld. Didn't mention it because it seemed more niche. But I adore Underworld.
I think it's pretty funny to call out the clothing as stylish.
As far as I remember, Mulder's suit was meant to look like the cheap and ill-fitting suit that a low-level, young government employee would buy for a dress code and because he didn't want to think about clothing.
And so much of the environment was slightly strange to US viewers, I think, because it was mostly filmed in the Pacific Northwest and Vancouver, and felt just ever so slightly in the uncanny valley of being like much of the US but also not.
I also think the technology was somewhat reduced for plot purposes. Consider the "road warrior" template that already existed for business travelers, with more use of laptops, cell phones, email, etc. I think the writers just found it convenient to make communication and information research more cumbersome than it really had to be in that era...
Best show on network TV at the time (and possibly since then). I look forward to seeing how Hulu is going to ruin its remake.
The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting bigger, but was still quite "small". I definitely feel quite privileged to have lived through this time, and enjoy all things '90s quite a bit. Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure, and I wish they would just stop. Now, if you will excuse me, I am going to hang out with the Lone Gunmen for a bit.
It might just be age and experience, but the world felt bigger in the 90s than it does now.
Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be there; No portable means of communication (easily / cheap). Now we have portable comm devices where we even use them between rooms.
As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
It felt bigger because of a few things:
1. The world felt farther away. It was much harder to learn current events about far away places, and talk to people there.
2. The number of websites you spend most of your time on has shrunk. Facebook/Insta/TikTok is a lot of people's entire internet diet.
It totally felt bigger because so many experiences required access to specific physical objects and getting those took forever.
35mm film processing, CDs (tapes even worse), VHS . . . these were all things deemed not exactly ideal at the time.
It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.
24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and internet usage was fast growing, but gaps in the digital side meant it was still plausible that field agents were important. They also had plot lines such as the bad guys using online video game chat (a smaller but growing thing in the early 2000s) as a hidden communication channel which I believe is pulled from real events.
24 was extreme racist pro-torture fear porn propaganda.
So yes - definitely had its finger on the pulse of early 2000s America.
> Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure
I second that. Please, for the love of all good things, do not remake the X-Files, or Firefly.
The upcoming Firefly series will be animated, seems like the right choice
Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
There are still lots of us alive who have experienced this. And to us, X-files felt high tech for the time. This was a time period when I think people were just waking up to powers of computers and technology, in particular alien tech, due to the incalculable complexities of ideating and creating magical electrical boxes - microprocessors. How could humans be capable of doing this, after all?
One poster already mentioned Matrix, but games like Alpha Centauri and others had also explored socioeconomic themes of power laws and what massive sweeping changes entail.
You can still get the 90s and 2000s experience to some extent. It hasn’t truly left, but society has moved on so it is a rather isolated journey and somewhat limited. But you won’t get MTV or any of that nowadays sadly.
For me, my car is a mid 2000s model so the way I listen to music is to buy CDs. I haven’t stopped. That part of 80s/90s hasn’t gone away, but it doesn’t really feel nostalgic either because it’s normal. To others of course, especially newer generation, they don’t even know we had to rewind tapes manually sometimes because the device would fail to do it properly.
The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
What I remember most about the 90s was the overwhelming optimism. Technology was going to make our lives better and unlock opportunity, not take all our jobs and render us irrelevant.
To me, the weirdest thing about the AI hype cycle is the inherent nihilism of it all. If there's one thing I miss, it's the optimism. I used to be enthusiastic about what the tech industry was doing and where it was going.
> The larger thing we lost is the internet. There’s no “90s internet” that someone can do without doing some stupid geocities/angel fire meme site. I don’t have an answer to this.
How about this: Back in the late 90s, after Google appeared, search actually worked, worked well, and was not yet deeply tied into creepy tracking and ad tech.
I would wade through thousands of geocities memed sites to have that experience again.
The optimism died a long time ago. I’m a Millennial, the 90s flew by as I was growing up, but one of my formative experiences was playing Deus Ex in 2001, after 9/11. It gave me healthy distrust of technology, governments, big corp, and what the world is going through today only reinforces this vision of the world. Of course I am nihilistic about AI: when I read about Altman and Karp, I see Bob Page. These are NOT the type of people I want to create a new world order. Yet these are exactly the people positioned to create a new world order.
I feel the older generations still believe that technology will set us free.
I miss the optimism too. What drew me to tech was how it felt like we were trying to make people's lives better.
These days, it feels like tech is primarily interested in extracting value from us. I guess this is nothing new. Profits at any cost, and all that.
I don't know, I'm just kind of sad about all of it. Even though my smartphone is like 100x more powerful than my first computer, it still feels like something was lost
On a similar note, go back and watch the party scene from the 1991 movie “City Slickers.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_Slickers
For 90s kids who remember their parents having people over, parties were really like that! Obviously without the drama and comedy. But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically. In 1990, 55% of men reported having six or more close friends. In 2021 it was down to 27%. The percentage of men who have no close friends is up by a factor of five, to 15%.
> But people would come over and socialize and not be glued to screens. And we have data that things have changed dramatically.
My wife and I are moderately social with diverse groups of friends. I haven't been to a party where guests were glued to screens in years.
I can think of a few, but they were so uninteresting that we didn't prioritize future events with those people. Why would I spend my limited free time hanging out with people who don't want to socialize?
Thinking back, those people probably think that staring at phones at social events is just what people do, so it was okay. When you don't see your friend group self-selecting into a bubble of people with shared beliefs and behaviors, you think everything around you is how everyone in the world operates.
There are two shows I still watch from start to finish every few years: The X-Files and Star Trek: TNG
I think I have watched Star Trek: TNG all the way through 3 times with my kids already. They also love Deep Space 9.
DS9 is also great. I don't go through it as often but it's definitely in rotation.
I have been kicking around this idea for a bumper sticker. "The '90s were lame, but they were still better than this."
I remember not loving the '90s when I was living through them, but my sense now (and I am hearing it more and more from others) is that we didn't realize how good we had it.
To anyone with this kind of nostalgia I'd recommend watch 'Perfect Days'. You can live however you want.
While it is impossible to not have a smart phone at this point you get to decide how you use it. Want to feel like you are in the 90's? Stop using your phone. Consume only old or physical media if you want, get rid of streaming services. Go buy an old car if you feel like it. Go read a book. Anything you could do in the 80's and 90's you can do now just as easy. You just have to curate such a life.
I think the only place you have to compromise is work. You can't roleplay like it's the 90's if you work in tech. But hey when you clock out of work turn your laptop off and go do whatever you want. Again, there is nothing stopping you from doing anything you could have done back then now (except maybe buy a house).
That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
> That was a great time to be a kid and so much of what I did in that era is gone now. Going with friends to Blockbuster? Hanging out at the arcade? Stopping in at the mall because you will probably run into friends there? From age 15 to 25 I was at a house or field party a couple times a month.
This is true. I didn't really think about it from a kid/youth perspective. As an adult I think you can live a similar life style but kids definitely have been robbed of all of this. I'm past 25 and I average a house party a month still I would say. House party's are permission free though, if you want one then host one.
> And things like streaming services are no replacement for video stores. Scrolling though a list doesn't compare to going to a video store, wandering the aisles, bumping into people you know, talking and flirting and finding out about parties, and totally changing your plans based on who you happened to run into. The random social interactions were important.
Video stores still exist. Depending how big of a town/city you will still bump into people you know if you are out and about.
>You can do 90's larping, but unless you are doing it with all the people of the same generation from your community it's only a shallow facsimile of the real thing.
Live how you want. If it's good others will follow your lead. I deleted all social media over five years ago and I have some friends who have at least tried to follow my lead. I read a ton, my friends do as well. I have a group of guys to play magic with every week where we take turns hosting.
If you have a vision of what you want the world to be the first step is to live that way yourself. Either others will follow or they won't, but you can't force people to do anything.
> I think the only place you have to compromise is work.
Or if you have a family.
The next time I say "We didn't have (to do) X in my days and things were just fine (or better)", I'll be kicked out of my house. :-)
Books have been replaced by DVDs at my library. I spent almost all my time at a book store for a year in Austin and can count the number of active readers I saw in there on one hand. It's depressing.
Reading is an independent activity by nature. I don't really see how other people not reading should affect you. There is nothing depressing about nature. It's natural that the majority of people would shift away from reading and gravitate towards easier forms of media consumption.
> Reading is an independent activity by nature.
This wasn’t my experience at all. I read similar novels as friends, we talked about them, tried to replicate some of the stuff the characters did, have suggestion about books to each other, lent them out, went to the bookstore together, etc.
People read books on public transport before the iPhone and that was often the path to strike a conversation with a complete stranger who nonetheless shared interests (depending on the book they were reading).
Books certainly could be completely individualized experiences, but they offered a whole world of socializing opportunities.
Reading is an independent activity, but wandering through a magazine store with friends while you were on your school lunch break wasn't.
Growing up in the 90s in Moscow wasn't all cakewalk (immigrated to US soon after), but I fondly remember watching the show and reading Russian-translated X-Files books. I don't know why the books were so fascinating to me. Imagined my life in America as something akin to Fox Mulder: suit, nice hair, car, hotel, official business. The lifestyle was all foreign to me, and also the coolest ever.
One of the all-time great shows. Mythology episodes mixed in with the "monster of the week" ones for the casual viewers. The music was also pretty special. Each episode was like a mini feature film.
Can’t remember where I first heard it (message board? Kumail’s podcast?), but I read/heard a really strong case that the core theme of the X-Files is informational enclosure/the dawn of the modern cyber panopticon, and how for good or bad all the little weird, secret corners of the world get catalogued and dissected as technology encircles all.
The 90s truly were a wonderful decade for human creativity.
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true. People either believed everything they heard, or they took it with a grain of salt. Either way, it was incredibly easy to let your imagination run wild with a crazy idea, even if you firmly believed in science and the burden of proof. That was the one-half the magic of The X-Files.
The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.
Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.
Here's another, next-level of nostalgia: a copy of the official Gillian Anderson website (1) with her favorite music from the 2000s.
1. https://gilliananderson.ws/webarchive/about/favmusic.html
Wow. I didn't realise how much I miss that era of web design. Reminds me of PhpNuke/game clan sites.
The 90s were my 20s - I still remember walking back with my girlfriend from the sea in the evening, across a residential area and we could here the jingle of X-Files on tv through open windows.
This is one of the images in ly life I keep going back to and cherish.
It is interesting hiw sounds and smells are strongly embedded in these memories.
Yep, things went downhill after social media.
Social media + mobile phones pit the ingenuity of our cleverest minds against the will and habits of the many, to sell ads.
Ah, the 90's. Bill Clinton raised taxes, which eliminated the deficit, which made interest rates go down.....My biggest problem in life was wondering which company which was trying to recruit me had the best stock option package.
There are a few things which have gotten better. Gay marriage. Marijuana legalization. But Entshitification is real and for the last 25 years has been relentless.
And let's be honest, that is also partially Clinton's legacy. Him and Tony Blair, with their "Third Way" triangulation bullshit, effectively moved the Overton window to the right for good. And here we are.
As a layman in politics, why did that shift things right in a bad way? Reading a summary of "third way triangulation" makes it sound good.
Mostly because of the implications for deregulation.
Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.
Lone Gunmen I go back to more than X-Files. It is short and very fun.
A less fun show I go back to is Harsh Realm.
Yes, it was short and fun, to those who appreciated it, but the world was saturated with X-Files. I would have waited 5-10 years, then brought the Lone Gunmen back for a revival. The viewers would've had time to miss X-Files and thus Funny & Quirky would have appealed more to a nostalgic audience. I think it can work again, given the right conditions, the writers, same actors + new faces, even different shows/genre crossovers. There I go, again, giving advice for which I am never credited :|
Like Synthwave
I was there and I can tell you that it was genuinely better times.
The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Tech was exciting, futuristic.
Politics - whilst certainly always grubby and adversarial - had not descended into lies and manipulation and misinformation and attempts to destroy the democratic systems.
People talked socialized read books.
Dating hadn’t been turned into a high volume marketplace in which no one is ever satisfied and everyone is always upgrading.
The environment and global warming were an issue for sure but not like now.
It's looking more and more like The Matrix was correct ... the end of the 1990s was peak human civilization.
> People talked socialized read books.
Reading books - perhaps more than they do now, but in the 90's it was already on its way out.
> The 80s and 90s were peak western civilization.
Only if you consider west "civilization" as the US.
I enjoyed things in the 80s and 90s, but many things about it sucked too.
In many ways I like the current times a lot more than this idealized past.
Literally everything is just shite now. Movies and TV are shite, food is shite, the economy is shite, politics is shite, dating is shite, electronics and tech is cheap ad infested shite, even the reffing in sports is shite! Things get more expensive yet also worse somehow, our wages don't even come close to matching inflation, housing is propped up to keep old people's investments secure meaning we don't even have places to live.
Im a young millennial so I can relate both with millennials and gen-z, and from what I can tell the vibes are just really really bad. People don't even really care about the future anymore because they know it's just going to continue to be shite.
The media landscape we have is something I couldn't have even imagined when I was young in the 80's. However, I can go back and watch, for free, essentially every movie ever made. I've gone back and watched dozens (maybe hundreds) of movies that I remember coming out when I was a kid, wanting to see, but never getting to because I was too young, or I couldn't find them at video stores, etc.
There were a _lot_ of _really_ bad movies and TV shows that came out when I was young, including movies and TV shows that I loved at the time. They were awful - we just watched them because there was literally nothing else to do. We're bombarded with entertainment choices now and our standards have gone up.
I agree with some of that, but not with TV.
The best TV shows today are as good as or better than TV has ever been and there's usually an ad-free option.
Televised sports is an exception- the number of ads is insane and there's no real way to avoid them. On the plus side though, I have access to a lot more games/matches/races/etc...
Im a elder millennial and i hope that things are ripe for a change, because it really does feel like everyone is pissed off about the system
Yep, I'm not a socialist but I don't even care if thats where young people are moving towards, we just need change.
We have amazing cell phones, though.
The 90s were incredible. The Matrix had it right when it mentioned in 1999 "peak of human civilization".
* Music was incredible
* Movies were amazing, enough to go to the theater 12 times a year at least
* Homelessness was pretty much non-existent
* People were friendly and had time for strangers
* Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z)
* Jobs actually made people feel needed and going to work was an incredible feeling for your soul.
* Very few people were on drugs 24/7 like they are today
Our biggest problem was probably Alcohol, which has actually dipped today (but probably because people are on pot instead)
If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.
Homelessness was a giant issue in 1991, there were pop songs about it: Gypsy Woman (La da dee la da da) by Crystal Waters, and Walking Down Madison by Kirsty MacColl. We don't seem to have pop stars singing about issues any more. Unsure whether that's a plus or minus.
> If I had $200 Billion I would literally give all of it to be a teen again for ten years from 1990 to 2000 again.
I so so wish I could go back as well. Its such a magical time in my memories. I was 6 in 1990 and I was 16 in 2000. God, what a world that was!
Ah, a fellow 1984 release.
I'm pretty nostalgic for the 90s. Maybe everyone who had at least a halfway-decent childhood feels that way about their kid years, though.
My country had a complete economic collapse in the 90s and people could barely afford food, so mileage varies.
As an oil exporter country we were saved in the 00s by oil prices ballooning to the moon, so that was the golden decade for us instead (relatively speaking, and mostly in the big cities).
> * Employment was 10x better than today, and not by today's way of counting (which don't count group x y and z)
I'm pretty sure we count unemployment the same way. Those groups are just larger now because of age, education and economic malaise.
> The 90s were incredible
I was born in 1974 and I remember being vaguely annoyed in my 20's at how the 90's "ruined" the 80's - I remember things being way better in the 80's and society starting to go downhill around 1991.
I will say, though, the poster's lament that he's nostalgic for a time he never knew is one I've heard a _lot_. My kids watch "Stranger Things" and ask if it was really like that when I was a kid ("did you really just get on your bike and go over to your friends houses?") and wish they had experienced the 80's (and even the inferior 90's). I _never_ felt that way about my parents generation - the 60's were interesting from a historical perspective but I never wanted to be there.
for 200 billion you better throw in knowing what you know now in to the mix, then it would pay for itself
Eh, the anti-gay sentiment was really bad in the 90s. A couple of my college buddies came out and instantly lost half their friends.
Not to forget cheap housing !
I am not sure where you experienced the 90s or at what age, but your experience is the opposite of mine.
I agree with a lot of that person wrote. I'm a healthy white guy born in 1970 into a very supportive family in a middle-class town in Canada. I basically won the lottery.
I was a kid in the 1970s, a teenager through the 80's and turned 20 in 1990. I had everything I needed and most things I wanted (eventually). High school was easy and actually fun. University was cheap (compared to now) and I had a blast. Graduating with a degree in comp. sci. in 1995 was bonkers. Opportunities were everywhere.
There have been some ups and downs, but I really don't think I would have wanted to be born any other time or place.
They mention being a teenager then, so a lot of their feelings might come down to "it was fun being a teenager" sprinkled with some effects of late stage capitalism.
I have a lot of nostalgia for the pre-9/11 world too but be careful with the rose tint.
It wasn't so wonderful if you were gay, for example. AIDS was still new and scary in 1990, and society was not so accepting of that lifestyle.
I remember when I was a teen it wasn't uncommon to go to a Boston Pizza-tier restaurant and have the waiter make a quip about "not wanting to look like a fag" by ordering the same thing as the guy next to you. This was a thing into my 20s, as late as 2007 probably.
It's interesting to me that many of the comments about not romanticizing the 80's and 90's across all forums reference 'it wasn't that good if you were gay' which would be like 3-5% of the population at the time? We had a society that 95% of people would say was ideal and the only knock is that it wasn't great for a small minority versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned...
Different strokes and all that but I'm pretty happy it's much less socially acceptable to beat the shit out of 5-10% of the population for no reason.
> versus now we have a lifestyle that is universally panned
I don't agree with this premise at all.
Its true that it wasnt as good if you were gay, and im glad that its better now.
But, its also true that it was better in many ways that affect both gay & straight people!
>Music was incredible
Ehhh, the post-grunge world was a bit of a musical wasteland. Rock died as a culturally relevant force with Cobain, but hip-hop hadn't ascended yet, so we were stuck in this weird doldrum that gave us things like the swing revival, ska, nu metal, and boybands. I mean Counting Crows were the big megastars at the time. Really hard to name a timeless album from '96-'99 the way you easily could on either side of that range. Just see the set-list for Woodstock '99 to further illustrate the point.
Here’s a list of albums just from 1998.
Mezzanine from Massive Attack, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Big Pun’s Capital Punishment, You’ve Come a Long Way Baby from Fatboy Slim, and Hello Nasty from the Beastie Boys. The K&D Sessions from Kruder and Dorfmeister. Stunt by Barenaked Ladies. Then there’s one of my personal favorites, Mermaid Avenue from Billy Bragg and Wilco.
You mentioned rock. How about Hellbilly Deluxe from Rob Zombie? Follow the Leader by Korn. The New Radicals released Maybe You’ve Been Brainwashed Too. Garbage’s Version 2.0, and Lenny Kravitz 5, and Van Halen III. What’s more rock than Walking into Clarksville by Page & Plant?
You're making his point for him.
All those albums are hilariously overrated and not representative of the truly good music coming out at the time.
Tool, Weezer, Sublime, RATM, Radiohead, Foo Fighters, Blink-182 all put out amazing albums from 96-99.
Rose coloured glasses though - I was a teenager at the time.
I was in my 20's at the time. I saw all of those guys as being inferior GnR, Motley Crue or Metallica wannabes.
OK Computer (1997). Mezzanine (1998). New Forms (1997). Peak trip hop and drum and bass. I remember it being pretty great. But yeah, I was like 17, so …
Edit: commenter below with Underworld - 100%.
Wow I've never disagreed harder with an HN comment in my entire life. Counting Crows were a single band that got some radio time in the early 90s. Calling them the big megastars during '96-'99 makes you sound like you weren't alive then. That statement just sounds so utterly ridiculous to me. It's like a narrow-minded European claiming that everyone in the US just eats nothing but hot dogs. Timeless albums from that era:
- Odeley (Beck '96)
- Aenima (Tool '96)
- OK Computer (Radiohead '97)
- Homogenic (Bjork '97)
- This is a long drive for someone with nothing to think about (Modest Mouse '96)
- Stankonia (Outkast '99)
- Kid A (Radiohead '00; began recording in Jan '99)
You were just rage baiting, right? The late 90s were an absolutely legendary time in popular music history.
Edit: Yes, agree with commenter who mentioned Underworld. Didn't mention it because it seemed more niche. But I adore Underworld.
Endtroducing.... (1996)
Second Toughest in the Infants (1996)
In Sides (1996)
Homework (1997)
To name a few. The 90s were great for electronic music.
Underworld / Second toughest in the infants
NIN / The Fragile
Radiohead / OK Computer
Daft Punk / Homewerk
All of these are generation defining albums.
I would like to add, all the jungle/dnb of the 1990’s and Rhythm & Sound.